Problem reading external drive after switching enclosures

My Time Machine backup was on a 2 TB WD My Essential external drive. I run a 2008 iMac that doesn't support USB3 speeds so I removed the drive from the WD enclosure and put it in a Rocstor enclosure that uses Firewire 800. After switching enclosures, my iMac wouldn't read the drive without formatting it. Anyone know why that is? Does it have something to do with the firmware on the HD itself? It was no big deal as I was going to format and partition the drive anyway. I would just like to know why going from USB to Firewire would cause it to do that. BTW, after reformating the drive, it appears to be working just fine as it did before.

No it is not a problem with the firmware on the drive. It has to do with the Firewire system on the Mac or any computer. I have the same thing happen when I have a drive that was using USB and put that drive in a FW adapter. Once in the FW adapter OS X wants to format it, actually initialize it. Once reconnected by USB again the drive works fine. You do know that you have voided the WD warranty on that unit by taking the drive out.

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Are you having problems with the Lacie external drive after upgrading to OS X Mavericks?

See here for everyone discussing the issue you are having:
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Ella Hurrell...
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Message was edited by: samben52

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Solved!
Go to Solution.

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===Jac
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Hello,
after upgrading to Lion last week I am experiencing some problems with my LaCie 1 TB FireWire (800) external drive.
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Is it only Lacie drives you've had trouble with, or is it other brands as well?
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External Hard Drives not recognized now by 10.5.7
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2010075&tstart=0
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http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2004304&tstart=60&start=15
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Problem reading external drive after switching enclosures

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